That noise you are hearing…that’s the sound of a marketing revolution

10Nov08

I recently posted that the economic crisis could provide a turning point in marketing and media history and based most of my commentary on observations of how the media would be affected at a critical time when emerging media and technologies were gaining a foothold in the marketplace.

Just over a month later I would suggest my observations were closer to realisation than I anticipated, and not just due to the economy.

In that time we have seen the first black man swept into power in the USA on the back of some amazingly effective groundswell marketing and fundraising that has re-written political campaigning forever.

And now the trickle of news indicating change was underway has become a torrent of commentary and press releases, especially in America.

Here are just some of the stories that have caught my attention in the last few weeks. You don’t need to read the entire articles, just the headlines, to realise that something big is happening:

AdAge.com
One-Way Media Lost the Election as Cable, Interactive Dominated

Barack Obama’s historic campaign for the presidency rode the wave of a sea change in the way that consumers access, personalize and share news and information. That transformation was happening with or without the election, but the campaign activated millions of young people already accustomed to consuming media in different ways.

The winners were the ones that fed the public’s desire for news where and when they wanted it: 24-hour cable TV news; participatory blogs that aggregate news of a political bent; websites that allow users to access media on their own terms (YouTube) and those that allow users to communicate and organize with each other (Facebook). Losers were the one-way media of the past: While the broadcast networks weren’t without their moments, they were more marginal than four years ago. Network prime time, bereft of new hits and attempting to appeal to a distracted population, was down by double digits this fall.

Social Networks Steal Time From TV, but There’s Hope

As has been widely reported, social-networking sites are visited monthly by more than 100 million consumers, and billions of page views are recorded on these sites.

The Digital President

The genius of Barack Obama’s approach to social media throughout the 2008 presidential campaign was that it was never actually about him (to paraphrase from his election night speech).

The goal was not to find an audience to whom advertising could be delivered. The goal was to build a movement — to create a community, to connect individuals to one another and to empower people by giving them the tools to organize and take action.

Will Print Survive the Next Five Years?

The print business was horrified enough last week when The Christian Science Monitor revealed plans to fold its 100-year-old daily print edition in favor of the web and a weekly print product. But by the end of one of the worst weeks in the history of newspapers and magazines, the Monitor was starting to look like one of the few places publishing could turn for even a dim ray of hope.

As Ratings Fall, Networks Take on Ad-Skipping

With DVR penetration knocking on 30%, much of America now views the ability to skip ads on TV as something approaching a birthright.

While they haven’t had much choice in the matter, the broadcast networks say they’re OK with this, that DVR users watch more TV and disproportionately more shows from ABC, NBC, Fox and CBS, which can’t be bad, right?

But the networks haven’t given up on the dream of a world of must-see advertising and are quietly attempting to take back that right — let’s call it a privilege — on the next generation of digital platforms. Already, the networks have effectively eliminated ad-skipping on broadband and have made that a prerequisite in deals with online distributors such as Hulu, Joost and Veoh, as well as ABC.com’s full-episode player.

The Broadcast Ad Model Is Broken. Now What?

Virtually all parties involved agree the current broadcast advertising model is broken, or at the very least inadequate. What they don’t yet agree on is the solution, leading to mass confusion as networks scramble to create their own measurements in a race to develop a standard for counting those precious eyeballs.

from the Wall Street Journal

Broadcast Blues Hit Media Firms

The TV industry today is like a tale of two cities.

Earnings from big media companies this past week showed cable channels are comfortably surviving the economic slowdown. Broadcasters? Not so much.

from Marketing Magazine

Online advertising continues to experience strong growth in face of the global economic pressures

Online advertising continued to grow through 2008, reaching record revenues of $450m in the quarter ending 30th September according to figures released today by Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Australia in its Online Advertising Expenditure Report (OAER) which is compiled by PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC).

Advertisers spent over $100m more in Q3 2008 than they did in the corresponding quarter in 2007, a growth of almost 30% year-on-year.

According to Paul Fisher, CEO of IAB Australia, the results clearly demonstrate the growing confidence in the medium particularly at a time when companies face pressures on their marketing decisions due to the global economic crisis.

and from Seth Godin

Marketing lessons from the US election

You can read the whole post at the above link ( and I highly recommend it) but here are the bullet points:

• Stories really matter
• TV is over
• Permission matters
• Marketing is tribal
• Motivating the committed outperforms persuading the uncommitted
• Attack ads don’t always work
• We get what we deserve

I don’t know about you, but that is a LOT of information in the last few weeks signalling a substantial shift in media and marketing around the world. And I believe that this will continue.

The impact of the Barack Obama election win will be massive and most likely result in a rush to clever online and social networking strategies. As President it appears Obama will continue to use such initiatives to communicate and discuss issues. This will further serve to bring social media to the mainstream. The economy may just accelerate the change.

Yes folks, that noise you are hearing, the clattering of keyboards, the posting of blogs, the forwarding of videos, the recording of podcasts and vodcasts, the searching of Google and the Twittering of business leaders is the sound of a marketing revolution. Its not as loud as the previous regime, but boy oh boy is it catching on.

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